More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829 - 1889 by Stephen Kantrowitz

More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829 - 1889 by Stephen Kantrowitz

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More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829 - 1889 by Stephen Kantrowitz

The story of the African American journey from slavery to freedom usually begins with heroic abolitionists, peaks with emancipation during the Civil War, and trails off amid Reconstruction's violence. In More Than Freedom, award-winning historian Stephen Kantrowitz redefines our understanding of this entire era by showing that the fight to abolish slavery was always part of a much broader campaign by African Americans to claim full citizenship and to remake the white republic into a place where they could belong.

More Than Freedom chronicles this epic struggle through the lives of black and white activists in and around Boston, including both famous reformers such as Frederick Douglass and Charles Sumner and lesser-known, but equally important figures, such as the journalist William Cooper Nell and ex-slaves Lewis and Harriet Hayden. While these freedom fighters have traditionally been called abolitionists, their goals and achievements went far beyond emancipation. They mobilized long before they had white allies to rely on and remained militant long after the Civil War ended.

These men and women called themselves "colored citizens." They fought to establish themselves in American public life by building their own networks and institutions and by fiercely, even violently, challenging pro-slavery laws and practices of exclusion. But as Kantrowitz explains, they also knew that until the white majority recognized them as equal participants in American life they would remain a suspect class. Equal citizenship meant something far beyond freedom and even beyond equal rights. More than inclusion and respect, they sought a citizenship of the heart.

Even though these reformers ultimately failed to remake the nation in the way they hoped, their struggle helped bring about the Civil War, redefined the war's meaning, and left the postwar nation forever altered. Without their efforts, war and Reconstruction could hardly have begun. Bringing a bold new perspective to one of our nation's defining moments, More Than Freedom helps to explain the extent and the limits of that freedom achieved in 1865 and the legacy that endures today.

Penguin Press, Hardcover, 2012

This is a BRAND NEW book. There is a black "closeout/remainder" mark on the bottom page edges.